Tuesday, November 14, 2006

This Sunday, get along to the Malthouse to hear Daniel Keene deliver the Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, an annual lecture to honour the memory of one of the key theatre practitioners in Australian theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. It will be presented free as part of the Malthouse Theatre’s Things on Sunday program.

Keene's lecture will be on "The Theatre of Difference". In a preview, he writes:

The theatre is not merely a mirror held up to society. If this was its only purpose it could never question, never oppose, never suggest an alternative to the status quo; it would always be safe, it would always pacify, it could never offer anything new. It would be culture’s Fast Food. And it would almost invariably be nationalistic, trapped within its borders, unable to admit difference and fearful of strangers.

Instead, the theatre might be considered a lens through which certain propositions can be seen. A place where a negotiation takes place, between everyday perceptions and imagination, between what is obvious and what is hidden; it would be a place without borders, a place where a truth could be told that was not the accepted truth. It could offer alternatives.

Theatre could be a place of seditious creation.

Daniel Keene is an award-winning playwright and longstanding theatre maker who has written for the theatre since 1979. He has won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama twice, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Drama twice and the South Australian Literary Award for Drama. He has also been awarded, with Ariette Taylor the Kenneth Myer Medallion for the Performing Arts for his work with the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project. His work has been presented at the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide festivals as well as produced all over Australia and, overseas, in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the United States, Canada, China and Japan.

PS: Sharp-eyed persons out for scandal, trashtalk and snide allegations of conflict of interest will note, of course, that Daniel Keene is my husband. This privileged relationship permits me to observe that he normally won't write things of this nature unless an AK-47 is pointed at his head: I take full credit for The Empty Church, since I was holding the weaponry. However, he has been showing visible signs of enthusiasm for this lecture, and I am quite disappointed that there has been no call for my role as intellectual stand-over merchant.